Monsters

My thoughts on the current state of global leadership.

Jun 23, 2024

Monsters

Monsters come to mind in a variety of manifestations. Gigantic, hairy or scaly, bloodthirsty beasts like King Kong and Godzilla. Weird insectoid, reptoid or robotic extraterrestrial predators from sci-fi movies. Scientific experiments gone awry as in the case of Frankenstein’s Monster or Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego, Mr. Hyde. Supernatural vampires, werewolves, zombies and ghosts and elusive legendary creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, Abominable Snowman, Yeti, and Sasquatch. Fictional movie villains like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Pinhead, the Blob, It.

Although these conventional monsters invoke fear, if not sheer terror or panic, we all know that none is hiding under our beds, in our closets or basements. They are not lurking in our backyards or around the corner, they are not waiting to jump out and attack us from behind thick bushes, and they will not invade our homes at night because they exist only in comic books, horror movies, folk lore or our imagination. There is no such thing as a monster. Or not?

What about human monsters? We’ve all heard of the notorious historical figures of Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, among others. And to that bunch, we can add infamous serial killers in the person of Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, et al. Though considerably more dangerous because these particular human monsters are real, the most well-known are either dead or imprisoned for life, and no longer a threat to the public.

So, how do you identify a human monster? The true test would be to poke a suspect with a pointed object, in which case there’d be no blood, only a puff of hot, fetid air, or a squirt of gritty, black oil or sticky green slime. But poking a human monster is impractical and highly dangerous.

On the outside, most human monsters look pretty much like anyone else. Male monsters wear a suit and tie, or a snappy uniform, maybe even a polo shirt and jeans upon informal occasion, and they tend to dress on the conservative side, preferring black, grey, and navy with perhaps a light blue shirt or a red tie for contrast. Some you could easily mistake for an undertaker. Female monsters assume a more fashionable, slightly more feminine shape in a dress or pantsuit in the same dull colours with a multi-coloured scarf or a set of pearls. However, she-monsters are sometimes so indistinguishable from their male counterparts that if not for the hairstyle, high heel shoes and higher-pitched voice, you’d have to look under the skirt to be sure. In terms of physical attractiveness, human monsters are rarely handsome or beautiful, having unusually big ears, large noses, beady eyes, thinning or wispy hair or ridiculous comb-overs and tending frequently to corpulence and a general look of poor health. Put human monsters in a crowd, and you’d have one helluva hard time picking them out. As neighbours, acquaintances and family members have said on camera of a serial killer, “So-and-so seemed like an ordinary guy.”

Besides their unassuming appearance, human monsters have spouses and kids, live in nice homes in upscale neighbourhoods, and work in high-paying positions that come with considerable influence. They may belong to social clubs and organizations, if they have the time to socialize (I assume that human monsters have friends, though they probably have more enemies). The most monstrous monsters become elected officials or administrative advisors, the latter being the better situation because, as long as they avoid scandal, they can never be unelected. Other human monsters gravitate to corporate leadership and money management, the acquisition of money and power being a human monster’s primary driver.

Human monsters are often charming, charismatic, reasonably intelligent, extroverted, and persuasive. On their predominantly dark side however, they are ambitious, arrogant, ruthless, self-righteous, manipulative, devious, single-minded, intransigent, and belligerent. They will do anything to get what they seek and they will let nothing, including the law, get in their way. In fact, the law is something they impose rigorously upon others, but flagrantly ignore and violate themselves with impunity. Clinically speaking, human monsters are psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. Very rarely do they have even any sense of humour.

Are human monsters born monsters, or are they products of their upbringing or environment? Putting genetics aside, the easiest way to turn an infant into a human monster is by indulging him/her from a very early age. This is best achieved by never disciplining a child and letting it do whatever it wants, when it wants and how it wants, in which case it will quickly learn to cry, scream, demand, storm, throw temper tantrums and eventually terrorize first its parents, then its friends, its teachers and later anyone who stands in its trajectory. No doubt you’ve seen some child whine, scream, shriek and throw a temper tantrum near the candy section while its hapless mother stands there immobilized by shame, or a group of children run wild in a public place while their feckless parents are absorbed with their iPhones. Then there are the little terrors who know that they have a free hand to wreak havoc in a classroom because Mommy and Daddy will threaten to have the teacher or principal fired if little Susie or Johnny is expelled. By the time a little monster is well on the way to becoming a Big Monster, the genie is out of the bottle.

Politically, monster creation works the same way. A larger, more powerful country, run of course by monsters, will adopt a smaller country of strategic significance and provide generous, unconditional financial, military and moral support. As long as the interests of the smaller country and its monster leader align with those of the larger—and why shouldn't they when billions of dollars are involved?—it is coddled, shielded, and indulged to the point where it can get away with crimes as egregious as ethnic cleansing and genocide. The smaller country—let’s call it Monster, Jr.—knows, just like children learn, how to wheedle, cajole, intimidate, coerce, shame and extort in order to get its way. Too highly invested in this symbiotic relationship, Monster Sr. will go so far as to threaten and sanction any international organization that dares to hold Monster Jr. to account for its crimes; in the extreme, Monster, Sr. will think nothing of breaking not only its own laws, but also international humanitarian laws, on Monster Jr.’s behalf. Eventually, it becomes difficult to tell if Monster, Sr. is controlling Monster, Jr., or if this works the other way around.

One defining characteristic of human monsters is that they are pathological liars. Besides making false and fictitious statements, they are given to bombastic, hyperbolic rhetoric and DoubleSpeak. They fabricate, confabulate, prevaricate, twist and distort facts, or completely make things up in order to construct a narrative that suits their particular purposes. Many of them are lawyers (need I say more?) They never give a straight answer, and when asked an uncomfortable question, they will viciously attack or disparage the questioner. Although they like to season their speeches with nice sounding words such as freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, they have only contempt for these concepts. The truth is as foreign to human monsters as reality is to schizophrenics; in fact, human monsters are schizophrenic in that they have no sense of reality as it is understood by anyone outside of themselves. Human monsters manufacture their own realities and live in them at everyone else’s peril.

As well as suffering from delusions, human monsters have a total lack of awareness and introspection. Being phenomenal hypocrites, they are quick to label their enemies and detractors as monsters, comparing them to Hitler and calling them Nazis while never once examining their own actions or taking a close look in the mirror. Human monsters will not, under any circumstances, engage in self-criticism, being of the firm belief that they are superior, exceptional, infallible and untouchable. They appear outwardly self-confident and self-assured; however, they are so deeply afflicted with fragile egos that the only way they can make themselves feel and look good is by making others feel and look bad. Under no circumstances will they ever admit to making a mistake unless they happen to use a “tragic” miscalculation as a way to shirk responsibility for the damage their actions or inactions have inflicted on others. When things go badly, human monsters always blame someone or something else. Getting a monster to take responsibility is like trying to put beads of spilled mercury back into the broken thermometer.

What is most frightening about human monsters—and what kind of monsters would they be if they were not able to scare the living daylights out of us?—is their enthusiasm for bloody conflicts and all-out war. War to human monsters is like alcohol to an alcoholic and heroin to a junkie, inducing not only physical euphoria, but also hallucinations of glory, grandeur and victory. If there happens to be no major conflict from which they can get their fix, they play gleefully, like naughty children with a box of matches in a dry grassy field, or they relentlessly tease and taunt an animal until it snaps and attacks, again like children who have been warned but just cannot resist. Unfortunately, human monsters start conflicts that everyone else pays for with their tax dollars, their security, their hopes and dreams, and ultimately the lives of their loved ones, if not their own. This rabid eagerness for war, bloodshed and destruction shows what despicable contempt human monsters have for human life, what naked disdain for the natural world, what criminal disregard for the future, what abhorrence for peace. It is their psychotic sense of their own importance that will take political monsters down any path that smells of blood and money, even if it leads everyone else to the gates of hell.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. And you have only to turn on any electronic device to see the human monsters I’ve been talking about. Can these human monsters be stopped or thwarted? In mythology and fairy tales, Hercules, Herakles, Perseus, St. George, Jack and the Beanstalk slayed the monsters. In the movies, we have Rambo, Indiana Jones, Dirty Harry, James Bond. But mythological, fairy tale and movie heroes are no help.

Now, I am not about to incite assassination or murder, but it would satisfy a vindictive impulse for me to see the whole cabal rounded up, herded into a room, knocked over the heads a few good times, loaded onto an airplane and dumped into shark-infested waters, or shot into outer space! That, of course, is wishful thinking!

We can always hope that some of these human monsters will self-destruct since they tend to possess suicidal as well as homicidal impulses. The problem with self-destruction, however, is that human monsters frequently take a lot of innocent people down with them.

In the final analysis, we should heed Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words:

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
Whoever fights against monsters should watch that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.

Which does not mean that we should not, or cannot, rise up, revolt, refuse, resist, and speak out against human monsters, even in the smallest way; rather, we must take care never to become monsters ourselves through apathy, indifference, negligence, inertia, cynicism, helplessness, futility. With tooth and nail, we must hang onto our hearts, our minds, our souls—our delicate humanity!

For Cryin' Out Loud!

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